ProOnGo Blog

Excel expense reports in ProOnGo are all about filling out your exact custom format. Last September we announced the general availability of our feature that lets you upload just about any excel expense report template, and have it added as a report type in our system. When you think about what that means, it should give you great assurance that no matter what changes you want to make to your customized templates later on, you’ll be confident that you’ll be up-and-running with ProOnGo very quickly in just a few simple steps. Now that this feature is closing in on being 8 months old, we thought we’d show off our latest tricks — what’s new, neat, and useful.

Tip 1: Excel Expense Reports via Thumbnail Preview

When you’ve got multiple Excel Expense Reports that you need to run (it’s more common than you’d think!), we now make it very easy to manage the various XLSX templates that you have uploaded. When you go to edit/add/delete templates, we now show you a visual thumbnail of each of your custom formats:

Excel Expense Reports – Choosing via Thumbnail

You can still name your templates with a text-based name (which used to be the only way to uniquely identify them), but the automatically-generated thumbnail should be a very helpful visual cue when you are managing your templates.

Tip 2: Configure Regions, Then Revise Anytime

When you set up custom Excel expense reports in ProOnGo, you’ll no doubt find yourself doing a drag-and-hold to multi-select a region of cells that you want us to fill out as a table of expense information. No problem, we’ve supported that from the beginning.

However, when we first launched, we discovered that no matter how hard we work on usability, the intricacy of custom excel formats almost ensures that even the most detail oriented user will find themselves going back to tweak some aspect of the original configuration. So, we’ve made it easier and more obvious how to re-configure a multi-cell selection:

Excel Expense Reports – Configuring Regions

The ‘re-configure’ button in the center of the multi-cell region is your invitation to click if you want to make some incremental change to the settings for that particular region.

Tip 3: Easy Export Compatibility

Once you set up a custom Excel expense report format, and you get around to running a report, you’ll now see easier-than-ever compatibility options:

Excel Expense Reports – Export Compatibility

When we first introduced custom Excel reports, you might have had to hunt for a minute or two if you wanted to find the best way to export your reports to Google Drive, Box, or Dropbox. Not anymore: you’ll see those options every time you generate a report.

What’s Next?

What’s next for this feature depends on, well, you! Tell us what you like, what you don’t like, and what problems you need us to put some brainpower into. We’re committed to giving you the easiest possible way to have your Excel expense reports fill themselves out, without you ever having to open Excel.

Our first publicly available version of ProOnGo Expense five years ago was little more than a receipt scanner that let smartphone owners snap pics of their receipts and have an expense report filled out automatically. We have great memories of those days, because that scenario was crisp and clear and easy to explain to even the most casual of users. It helped to heal perhaps the most “broken” part of the expense reporting process — replacing (in most cases) a manual process where employees were literally taping receipts together on a sheet of paper and submitting them with some kind of Excel-based expense report.

We were energized by the response to that initial launch, so we kept going, asking small business owners what their road warriors needed in order to not only take care of their process for receipts, but also “everything else” that they need to submit with their expense report.

Receipts → Receipts, Mileage, and Time

It wasn’t long before we ended up broadening our value proposition to include the ability to not only track receipts, but also to track mileage and time. Furthermore, our receipt tracking became much more refined when we started helping our users distinguish between receipts attached to corporate card expenses versus receipts that were from out-of-pocket expenses that needed to be reimbursed.

Likewise, our time tracking took a step forward when our customers taught us that sometimes filing “time activities” one-at-a-time is the easiest process, whereas sometimes filing a whole timesheet is the easiest process (usually for companies that are heavily powered by hourly labor or hourly billing).

Our customers have taught us a lot about what it takes to replace every scrap of a legacy based expense tracking process and modernize it into the world of web and mobile apps, and we’ve worked hard to keep up with the ever-expanding “suggestion box” from our customers.

The Power of the Expenses Tab

As we’ve gotten more and more detailed in the way that we serve your needs, our web app in particular has changed dramatically in the past year. Here’s a refresher on what you’ll find on the Expenses tab these days:

Expenses Tab in ProOnGo Expense

You can show/hide the various subtabs if you like — for example if you are sure that all you need is the Weekly Timesheet, or that all you need is the Corporate Card subtab — you could go into the Employees tab and tap the “Gears” icon to toggle on/off various sections:

Toggle On/Off Visibility of Tabs

However, we thought we’d at least explain the purpose of each section, before you decide which ones to show/hide and which ones you will use most often.

• All Expenses: This contains everything you’ve filed… mileage, time, corporate card expenses, out-of-pocket expenses.
• Corporate Card Expenses: This is where your credit card transactions arrive for cards issued by your company (sure there is some one-time setup involved, but after that they just magically arrive on a day-to-day basis). You wouldn’t want to clutter this subtab with ad hoc transactions from your personal cards, because this subtab is purely for corporate card expenses where there is no reimbursement to you because the company pays the bill to the credit card provider directly.
• Out of Pocket Expenses: This is where you file expenses that are from out-of-pocket spend for which you expect the company to approve and reimburse you. It barely matters what payment method you used at the time of the transaction (cash? personal debit card? personal credit card?) because that’s beyond the scope of what your company should know or care about. The point is, it’s for expenses that you paid out-of-pocket, that the company needs to reimburse you for
• Mileage Expenses: If your company reimburses you for mileage that you’ve driven on your personal car, for company business, then this subtab is for you. This is where you can document each trip that you make that you deserve reimbursement for.
• Time Expenses: If you occasionally need to track your time, but you don’t habitually need to do that on an “every week” basis, then this subtab is for you. This is a great place to go to file a occasional time activities (perhaps you rarely do billable work but once in awhile you do).
• Weekly Timesheet: Are you the kind of company where each person needs to file a full record of how they spent their time throughout the week? This subtab is for you — it’s a way of bulk-filing time activities in a traditional “weekly timesheet” format.

Keep sending in suggestions about how you want us to grow our solution next, and we’ll keep working to meet your needs!

Sometimes you’ve got a handful of scanned expense receipts that you just want to get into a safe keeping place — one less thing to worry about in a hard drive crash or “lost laptop” scenario. A couple years ago we came out with an emailed-in-receipts feature for precisely this reason: it provided a super convenient way to offload your receipt images to us, and simultaneously to get them turned into actionable expense details (merchant name, date, amount).

However, more recently we’ve had quite a few users that habitually use their personal credit card for out-of-pocket expense, with ProOnGo’s credit card subtab set up to sync transactions. So, what to do if you’ve got a pile of receipt images and you know the credit card transactions will arrive shortly? Easy: just drag them into the Receipt Gallery. That way, you’ll know that your receipt images are safe and sound to attach to your credit card transactions when they arrive.

Here are the basic steps for handling your expense receipts in this manner.

Adding Expense Receipts to the Gallery

In the ProOnGo web app, go to the Out of Pocket subtab and click Add Expense => Receipt Gallery:

Adding Expense Receipts to Gallery (Step 1)

Then, start doing drag-and-drop (as many times as you want), to drag your .PNGs, .JPGs, and .PDFs into the receipt gallery:

Adding Expense Receipts to Gallery (Step 2)

A relatively quick ‘status bar’ will appear while the upload is occurring (the speed of which depends mostly on your internet connection). Once the upload is complete, you’ll know that the receipt image is in the receipt gallery for future use.

Using Expense Receipts from the Gallery

So, what do you do if you want to take an image from the Receipt Gallery and use it as the image for an expense? Easy. Open the expense editor, and click on the Match from Gallery link:

Retrieving Expense Receipts to Gallery (Step 1)

Then, tap on the thumbnail of the receipt that you want to attach:

Retrieving Expense Receipts to Gallery (Step 2)

That’s all you have to do to make use of a receipt image that you have stored in the Receipt Gallery.

Your expense reports need a permanent home, and we’re happy to be that home. Our Archive tab is where you’ll find every expense report that you’ve generated as a subscriber to our service:

Archived Expense Reports: In the ProOnGo Expense Web App

But, what if you’ve got all of your other documents sitting on Dropbox, and you want your expense reports to ‘land’ there too? No problem. From the Archive tab, you can send any report to Dropbox with a click of this button:

Send to Dropbox

This works with any report that you’ve got in the Archive tab. Perhaps you use our standard Excel reports. Or maybe a company-specific Excel report template (yes, we support those). Or, you might use our auto-generated Excel reports during the send-to-QuickBooks process (if you use the “Send to Excel, too” checkbox). Whatever the case, know that you can send them to Dropbox to live with your other files.

Sending Expense Reports to Dropbox the First Time

The first time you click the Send to Dropbox button, you’ll need to authorize ProOnGo to send your expense reports to Dropbox. The team at Dropbox has done a great job making this screen explain specifically what access you are granting:

Authorize: giving ProOnGo access to upload to Dropbox

Then, you can stay organized by choosing a specific destination folder when you send to Dropbox – perhaps organizing your expense reports by quarter, or by purpose, or by business trip:

Choose Destination: for your expense reports

What’s Next

So, if you’ve got a habit of keeping your files on Dropbox, check out our Dropbox compatibility for your expense reports, and let us know what you think! We’re interested in expanding our compatibility with Dropbox, so send us your feedback if you have suggestions for improvements.

Have you moved beyond the days of piling up Excel spreadsheets, Word docs, and PowerPoints on your laptop, PC, or Mac’s hard drive? Good! With terrific cloud-based storage and collaboration options like Box (and it’s associated Box apps), there is no reason to take the risk of storing all of those important documents yourself.

Ready to hook up ProOnGo Expense to your Box account, to have your expense reports land alongside your other documents? Well, today we have good news for you: we’ve launched compatibility with Box, immediately available for you to try!

Video: Send Your Expense Reports to Box

If you haven’t yet set up a Box account, we’ll sweeten the deal: grab a free 10GB account complementary from Box, just for trying out ProOnGo Expense with Box! We have no doubt that you’ll prefer keeping your files on box, to have instant access to all of your files (far beyond just expense reports), from any web browser or mobile device. Enjoy your new 10GB account from Box, and we look forward to helping you get started with Box apps, particularly ProOnGo Expense.

Expense report templates are a drag. First, there’s the fact that your spreadsheet format might look like it was designed in the mid-90s (and maybe it was), since most companies don’t update their expense report templates very often. Second, there’s the fact that you are constantly procrastinating filling it out, lest you end up with another expense this afternoon and thus have to fill out a whole new form. Third, there’s the hassle of keeping your current and prior reports organized in case you get asked to add something so trivial as an additional writeup in a memo field.

With ProOnGo, we can make this a lot easer – we’ll fill out the expense report templates for you – and we’ll even upload to Google Drive if you’d like a backup there. If you can spare 84 seconds, check out the YouTube video demo by clicking here:

Video: Expense Report Templates – Use with Google Drive

Really we’d prefer to get you off of your Excel expense report template entirely – using our web and mobile expense apps to upload directly into your accounting system. However, we know that small business owners are creatures of habit, and if your boss insists on sticking with the Excel-based expense reports for now, you can fill it out “our way” (your boss won’t know or care that you cut through the red tape by letting ProOnGo do the hard work).

Although we’ve long been driven by a desire to make your expense reports as easy, speedy, and intuitive as possible, over the years you’ve talked to us about getting deeper insight into the behind-the-scenes infrastructure that makes it all possible.

And for good reason! In the rare instance that there is a disruption in our services, you want to know the “what” and “why”, and you want to know it quickly. Of course our goal is 100% uptime, but in a world where we’re increasingly compatible with other solutions that are complementary to ours, we can’t promise to wholly eliminate the risk that some part of our set of services is impacted by circumstances beyond our control.

So, what you can expect from us is simply a candid, timely update when we encounter a situation that causes a disruption to any of our major services. Today we’re introducing a new dashboard on our site — we’re calling it the Service Health Status dashboard. Check it out, bookmark it, or just remember to go to www.ProOnGo.com/status to stay up to date on our service health:

Service Health Dashboard

QuickBooks expense reimbursements via the Write Check method have always had one fatal flaw when it comes to how third party apps integrate with this functionality. The fact is, in virtually all of the QuickBooks-compatible expense reporting packages, it’s a “one and done” process. Once you send over a reimbursement check to QuickBooks, most packages won’t let you update, revise, or edit that check, if you discover some additional reimbursements that you’d like to add.

The result? You end up printing out two reimbursement checks to the employee (or worse, 3 or 4), as you receive and approve additional expenses that you weren’t expecting. Handling multiple checks is inconvenient for you, it’s not eco-friendly, and it’s a mess for the employee as well.

Expense Reimbursements via Splits – Cost Allocation is Crucial

There is a better way. To see the light at the end of the tunnel, start with the fact that checks are divided into split lines (“SPL” lines for you old timers) and imagine that you have an expense reimbursement check written to one of your employees.

First you’ll notice the Payee, the amount, and memo fields. But look closer, and you’ll notice that your reimbursement is really divided into one or more line items that “explain” the cost allocation in a more granular manner than the overall check.

To illustrate the purpose of “splits” for cost allocation, imagine that you have an employee that spent $50.00 on a Meals & Entertainment expense, and $20.00 on an Office Supplies expense:

You wouldn’t want to simply write a check for $70.00 without filling out two separate splits therein, because you would inevitably mischaracterize the available tax deduction — you’d either categorize the whole thing as Meals & Entertainment (likely characterizing the $70.00 as 50% tax deductible), or you’d categorize the whole thing as Office Supplies (characterizing the $70.00 as 100% tax deductible). Either way, you’ve mis-characterized the components of the expense, and therefore created an error at tax time.

Have we convinced you that your reimbursement checks surely need to be broken out into split lines, for cost allocation purposes? I hope so, but if not, leave a comment and ask a question.

Appending QuickBooks Expense Reimbursements to Existing Unprinted Checks

If you buy into our position that cost allocation via splits is crucial, then you are halfway to becoming a fan of our “Append Reimbursements to Existing Unprinted Checks” feature (we know, it’s a mouthful). See, if you already agree that splits are the only reasonable and correct way to handle an expense reimbursement check that is in response to multiple expenses filed by the recipient, then you are ready to ask the question “what do I do when I realize I overlooked one expense that I should have included?”

The answer, of course (presuming you haven’t yet printed the check):

…is to add an additional Split line with the initially forgotten expense, thereby raising the total of the reimbursement check, while correctly characterizing the cost allocation via the split.

That Sounds Obvious – Do All QuickBooks Compatible Expense Apps do This?

ProOnGo to the Rescue

The Video

With our cloud-based integration to QuickBooks (via Intuit’s secure cloud) and our support for QuickBooks reimbursements via Write Check and Vendor Bill, as well as full two-way sync for credit card registers, we believe we’re already the fastest way to sort out your QuickBooks compatible expense reports.

However, we wanted to do one better. Our most frequent users are accustomed to having to click to open each expense in order to add memos or touch up details such as items or classes, and we admit that even though that only takes a few minutes, its a few minutes that you’d rather spend doing something that is value-creating for your company.

So, here’s our answer to that feedback: we now let you “edit in place” so that you can tweak or update your expenses using a convenient hover-and-tap experience, which feels (and is!) much faster than opening up each expense, editing, and saving. Here’s the video demo showing the “new way” in action:

You can still continue to open, edit, and save expenses the old way when you want to do highly intricate or detailed work in each expense, but we bet you’ll find yourself using edit-in-place more and more over time. It’s turned out to be about three or four times faster in our casual testing with expense reports containing around 10-20 expenses.

Ready to get started filing expense reports into QuickBooks, via ProOnGo Expense? File your first expense report in no time at all.

Want to connect a third party app to QuickBooks Pro or QuickBooks Online? You’ve already heard what we have to say about steering clear of IIF files. So, if you are already onboard with that advice, what should you look for to know the app has secure access to Intuit’s cloud?

Well, here’s exactly the button you should look for:

This is a button provided by Intuit, to developers that are approved for Intuit’s App Center, and is a good indicator that you are about to Connect to QuickBooks via Intuit’s secure cloud. And, here’s what it looks like in action (click on image for full video):

Although the video doesn’t show it, if you aren’t yet signed into any other Intuit sites, the first thing you’ll see when you click the Connect to QuickBooks button is a sign in page that requires you to enter your Intuit Account credentials. And that’s a good thing. It’s an Intuit-hosted sign-in window that lets Intuit confirm that you are indeed the owner of a QuickBooks company file. That sign-in process is step one of a quick and easy setup process that allows developers like us to get secure access to company files that you authorize, all via Intuit’s secure cloud.